


love at first sight's for suckers (at least it used to be)

by CrimsonPetrichor



Series: the king of new york [2]
Category: Spider-Man: Homecoming (2017)
Genre: F/M, Fluff, Light Angst, Post-Spider-Man: Homecoming, questionable management of emotions
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-27
Updated: 2017-07-27
Packaged: 2018-12-07 19:28:30
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,830
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11630328
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CrimsonPetrichor/pseuds/CrimsonPetrichor
Summary: She doesn’t do daily agendas or five year plans, but one thing she does do is emergency preparedness. This includes: memorizing the contact information for every member of her immediate family in case she loses her phone, carrying two kinds of pepper spray on her at all times, and developing a game plan in case it turns out that her thing for Peter Parker isn’t the kind of thing that she can shut up about until it goes away.--A companion fic toi never planned on no one like you. MJ deals with her feelings for Peter about as well as you'd think.





	love at first sight's for suckers (at least it used to be)

**Author's Note:**

> This fic essentially runs parallel to the first fic in this series, so while you won't be totally lost if you don't read it beforehand, it might help with context.
> 
> I've lost control of my life to these two and honestly, I don't even mind at this point. The title is from _Newsies_ , just like last time.

MJ stifles another yawn and shakes her head, trying to focus on the page in front of her. She’s read the same paragraph about four times now and she feels kind of guilty for not giving it her full attention when the story is so compelling.

It’s Abe’s fault, really. He’d seen her reading _The Thing Around Your Neck_ yesterday and texted her late last night after digging up an Ama Ata Aidoo novel, which he was, in his words, forcing her to borrow ‘so that someone at this school can finally experience a piece of West African literature written by someone other than Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’.

(She’d hesitated, but then Abe had mentioned that the book was out of print in America and she couldn’t pretend that that didn’t immediately make her want to read it.)

That had started them off on a tangent on the lack of diversity in Midtown’s English curriculum, which had turned into a discussion of how eurocentric the Decathlon study guides were, which had ended, somehow, in both of them agreeing to put together supplemental study guides and a recommended reading list for the rest of the team.

Between that and her homework and the charts she was putting together to assess the team’s weakest subjects, it was past two by the time MJ had gotten to sleep, and now the two cups of probably-too-strong tea that she had this morning have officially worn off.

Any other day, she’d expect Ned and Peter’s chatter to keep her awake, but Ned’s supposedly at a doctor’s appointment and Peter is doing his Spanish homework, and it’s not that MJ like, _counts on them_ as the soundtrack to her reading or whatever. It’s just that the hum of the cafeteria feels too quiet somehow, like it’s paused, and how is she supposed to focus on reading when she’s under-caffeinated and it feels like somewhere a shoe is about to drop?

She sets her book down and looks over at Peter, who’s now chewing on his pen cap and staring into space, his eyes too glazed over for him to be considering a conjugation. “Hey, loser,” she says.

He blinks and turns to look at her, grinning entirely too pleasantly for a person who technically has just been insulted. “Nice to see you, too, MJ.”

She shoots him a flat look, then nods towards the bruise on his temple. “What’d you do to your face?”

Peter furrows his eyebrows for a minute, then immediately winces and MJ has to actively try not to roll her eyes. “Bumped my head on the bunkbed,” he says, not-quite-casually.

MJ doesn’t know if she should be offended that he thinks she’s going to buy that or proud that he managed to use an excuse other than ‘I walked into a door’, but before she can decide, a lidded paper cup appears in front of her and she’s hit with the smell of bergamot. She looks up to see Ned shrugging off his backpack and taking his usual seat beside Peter, neither one of them as perplexed by the appearance of this beverage as she is.

“What is this?” she asks slowly, eyeing the cup and its brown cardboard collar. There’s a tagged string hanging from the lip that tells her it’s Earl Grey, but that’s not what she wants to know.

Ned shrugs. “It’s tea. Peter said you w-” but then he stops talking abruptly. He glances at Peter, who’s suddenly absorbed in his Spanish book again, and shakes his head. “I thought you might want some, since I walked past that coffee place on my way back. You drink Earl Grey, right?”

MJ looks from the cup to Ned to the cup again and for a single, horrifying second, she feels a lump growing in her throat like she might cry. “Yeah,” she says, nodding. “Yeah, I do. Thanks, Leeds.”

“No problem,” he says, like it really isn’t one. She watches for another moment as he taps Peter’s shoulder -- dude is focusing really intensely on that textbook -- and launches into a discussion about a preview clip for some superhero movie, and MJ realizes that this really isn’t supposed to be a big deal. It’s just what people do for their friends without being asked: lend them books that they might like to read, grab them a cup of tea when they’re asleep with their eyes open, distract them from mind-numbing homework by being excited about a movie that looks truly terrible.

This time when she disappears behind her book, she takes the tea with her.

* * *

It’s the first afternoon in a while where the weather’s not miserably hot and her homework is light and there’s no Decathlon practice or after-school study sessions, and MJ is spending it in her natural habitat: indoors but adjacent to nature, at her favorite secondhand bookstore with a view of a tiny park across the street.

She’s been searching unsuccessfully for a copy of _The Master and Margarita_ without pretentious lit major scrawls in the margin when she gives up and heads for the poetry section. She glances out the big picture window at the front of the shop and stops in her tracks when she looks across the street and sees a little girl with a backpack and a book, reading alone on a bench.

The girl doesn’t seem anxious at all, swinging her legs and putting down her book periodically to scan the street in front of her. She’s probably done this before, but MJ keeps an eye out anyway just to be safe.

A few minutes later, MJ looks up from the chapbook she’s considering to see the little girl beaming as she waves excitedly to someone who seems to be in one of the apartments above the shop. She’s about to look away again when the girl’s gaze travels even further upwards, until she’s looking straight up at the sky in awe, and MJ watches in confusion for a half second before someone in a very familiar red and blue suit swings around a tree and lands a few feet away from the girl’s bench.

Other people in the shop are watching now, too, and there’s a scattered chorus of laughs when the girl moves her backpack to her lap and pats the seat on the bench beside her, gesturing for Spider-Man to sit. He does.

There’s really no way the little girl could be safer now, so MJ turns back to the book in her hands, satisfied. Unfortunately, it doesn’t hold her attention for that much longer, and she finds herself looking out the window again, watching them from behind the shelf. (This, she’d like to believe, is so that she’s near where she wants to be when she inevitably gets bored of watching them, but it’s really because she’d never be able to explain herself to Peter if he looked over and noticed her watching them and honestly her pride can’t take that kind of hit right now.)

When she looks back across the street, the little girl is very animatedly explaining something to Peter, and MJ can’t see his face, but he seems to be listening intently, periodically asking questions that have the little girl nodding very seriously in response. She bites back a grin and shakes her head. Of course he found a kindred spirit in a six year old.

MJ pulls a Suheir Hammad book off the shelf but doesn’t bother to open it, watching as the girl unzips her backpack and pulls out a piece of paper. She holds it out, and from the way that Peter points to himself and tilts his head, MJ knows that the little girl is giving it to him as a present. The audience in the bookstore lets out a collective noise of approval, but then Peter turns the paper back around to the girl and mimes a signature, and MJ’s hand comes up to rest against her heart like she’s in a silent movie. Suddenly she feels like she has to look away.

She turns on her heel, dropping to the floor to sit with her back against the shelf as she opens the book to a random poem and just starts reading. Her mind keeps wandering to what’s happening across the street, but she stays down, stubbornly turning page after page until the poems pull her in.

She only looks up again when she hears bell over the door of the shop ring and the voice of a little girl talking a mile a minute. “...and then, Mom, and then he said that I was really, really brave for moving the caterpillar on my own and it was good that I didn’t hurt it even though I don’t like bugs,” the voice is saying, and MJ just knows it’s the little girl from the park. She watches as the girl and her mother walk towards the stairs to the children’s section.

“And when I showed him my drawing, he told me it was really good, and he said that he has a friend who likes to read a lot and she draws, too, and he said she’s the smartest person he knows and he said that she-”

They disappear down the stairs and out of earshot, but MJ stays rooted in her spot with her heart somewhere in her throat until either five hours or five minutes later, when someone asks her politely to move.

She does.

* * *

The thing about being like, _friends_ -friends with Peter and Ned (as opposed to ‘sit in your vicinity at lunchtime, only talk to you at Decathlon practice’-friends) is that in spite of being people who seem to have only ever hung out with each other their whole lives, they’re actually really good at including her in things.

It was a little overwhelming when it started last semester, but now she’s used to it. Weekends bring text messages about movies and visits to comic shops and one time, the Stark Expo. There are shouted-across-the-hallway questions about whether she’s free to get coffee on the way home from school, and if this past December is anything to go by, the holiday season is going to bring an alarming amount of cookies from the Parkers and the Leeds family.

MJ rejects about fifty percent of these on principle (the invitations, that is, not the cookies -- she can be aloof sometimes, but she’s not an animal), but some things are interesting enough to draw her in at least once, and once is all they need to really stick.

Movie night is one of the things that stuck.

The Ned-and-Peter version of movie night already existed, but the MJ-and-Ned-and-Peter version came about around January, and it’s been a thing ever since. They trade off picking the movies and one of them always brings candy and they always put away a shocking amount of pizza for three people who decidedly are not carb-loading for a marathon.

In spite of the fact that they’ve been doing this for five months, though, some nights, Ned and Peter somehow manage to be late, and that means that MJ ends up doing what she’s doing now: drinking tea and making polite small talk with May as they wait for the boys to arrive.

This is a problem, not because MJ dislikes May or even because she’s super impatient to start whatever action movie Peter’s picked this week.

It’s a problem because MJ is a terrible small-talker. Or at least she is when it comes to May.

They’ve already retread every basic topic of conversation about a hundred times. They’ve talked about school and the news and Decathlon and how it’s shaping up to be another miserable and muggy summer in Queens, and that’s all that MJ has in her, really. With any other adult, she’d probably sit in silence or come up with an excuse to stare at her phone until someone came along and rescued her, but MJ can’t help wanting to impress May.

She tells herself that this is because she’s seemingly the first new person to enter Peter’s orbit since- well, since Ned, possibly. Of course she wants May to approve of her because May is probably incredibly wary of her. It makes perfect sense.

But Michelle Jones is smart, and she’s definitely too smart to bullshit herself into believing that.

She wants to impress May, she knows, because May is Peter’s family. Peter’s entire life, as far as MJ can tell, is split neatly into thirds between May and Ned and the ‘Stark Internship’ (or, as it’s better known to anyone who’s spent five minutes within earshot of Peter and Ned during gym class, the whole thing where Peter is secretly the vigilante superhero Spider-Man).

MJ wants May to like her because -- ugh, she feels ridiculous and slightly itchy even voicing it in her own head -- MJ wants May to like her because MJ likes Peter. Like, a lot. Like, a lot a lot.

(There it is, the phantom itch on her collarbone and the sudden sense that the Parkers’ apartment is about forty degrees hotter than it needs to be.)

A bystander might ask why this is a problem now, when clearly MJ has been obsessed with Peter Parker since they were freshmen, but the thing is that she wasn’t obsessed with him. Not really, anyway. She just...thought he was vaguely interesting and not altogether unpleasant to look at and he happened to be in enough of her classes that she noticed things about him, because that’s her curse in this life: to notice things about people that she’s barely talked to twice and then to thoroughly embarrass herself when she accidentally mentions these observations like they should be common knowledge.

Now, though, MJ actually knows Peter, and somewhere along the line her vague interest faded into familiarity which faded into this- this _thing_ in her chest and brain and stomach and hands. It makes everything flutter whenever she sees him and seizes control of her mouth almost immediately to make every sentence that she says as poor a choice as humanly possible. At best, it’s inconvenient. At worst -- and it’s always at worst when it’s late at night and she’s alone with her thoughts and the only person she can think of who’d probably care about getting a call from her so late is the person she can’t talk to about this -- at worst, it’s an incessant tide of tiny disappointments that she refuses to call heartbreak.

So she drinks her tea and she talks about art and books for a little while and she pretends that her heart doesn’t damn near thud out of her chest when May mentions that Peter’s the one who keeps bringing Earl Grey to the house because he knows it’s MJ’s favorite.

And when the boys stumble in, bearing pizza and candy and out-of-breath apologies, she packs away that part of her and greets them with her usual half grin and teasing insults, and if May looks from her to Peter and back with her eyebrows furrowed, MJ assumes it’s that old protective instinct kicking in and doesn’t think twice.

* * *

“So wait, is this white guy the asshole or the broody sweater guy from before? I can't tell,” MJ says, staring at the screen in faux confusion.

“The one who just got into the Jaeger now? That's Chuck; he’s the asshole. He pilots with his dad.”

She told Peter as a joke that she’d never seen _Pacific Rim_ when he’d picked it for tonight, but since then he’s been so sincere and attentive as he answers her not-at-all-serious questions that she doesn't have the heart to tell him she’s actually seen it five times. He keeps glancing over at her to see whether she’s enjoying herself, and although part of her brain says he kind of deserves the stress for thinking that MJ would miss a movie where Idris Elba looks this good, she’s touched.

MJ’s really starting to get into the movie when it happens: partway through the first Jaeger-Kaiju fight scene, Peter makes this tiny noise of distress, and she turns to him to see that he’s spilled something on his shirt.

As he stands up, she opens her mouth to say something mocking, but then he reaches an arm behind him and before she realizes what’s happening, he pulls off his t-shirt and suddenly she’s eight inches away from Peter Parker’s bare torso.

She can feel the heat start creeping up her neck immediately, her eyes widening because what kind of Star-Wars-Lego-set-building, Academic-Decathlon-going, unable-to-complete-sentences-in-front-of-a-pretty-girl _nerd_ has abs like that? She knows that he’s Spider-Man, and she’s, you know, _aware_ that anyone with abilities like Peter’s is probably in good shape, but honestly? It's like the universe is just showing off at this point.

(Her mouth is super dry right now. When did her mouth get so dry?)

MJ drops her gaze to the floor, the TV, anywhere, because she’s suddenly certain that she’s been staring at Peter’s chest for an amount of time that no sarcastic comment can brush off. He doesn't seem to have noticed, though, mumbling something about how he’ll be right back as he makes his way to his room.

She can't help but steal a glance behind her as he walks away and of course his shoulders are super nice and kind of broader than she’d ever realized and _Jesus Christ_ , if MJ sits here any longer she is going to burst into literal, actual flames

She scrambles to her feet then, pulling her phone out of her pocket and pretending to check her texts.

“What happened?” Ned asks. “There’s still half of the movie left.”

“I know, I know,” MJ says, coming around to the back of the couch to grab her backpack. “I just- I just remembered I've got a family thing tonight, and my mom keeps texting me, so I'm just gonna head out and-”

“You’re leaving already?” Peter asks, coming out of his room with a new shirt on and an expression that would not be out of place on a sad puppy. “But there's still so much of the movie left, and- and we were going to stop for ice cream before you went home at that place that does the Avengers-themed milkshakes.”

He sounds so earnest that for a second MJ almost convinces herself that making him smile would be worth the torture of having to sit beside him and somehow try not to be flustered over the fact that she can't stop picturing him with his shirt off.

She shakes her head, forgetting to be sarcastic. “Sorry, I- I can't. Tell May thanks for dinner. I’ll see you guys on Monday.”

MJ crosses the room and leaves before Peter’s puppy eyes break the last of her resolve. If they say goodbye to her as she closes the door, she’s too distracted to hear them.

* * *

When MJ makes it home, she barely stops for anything: she tosses a greeting over her shoulder to her mom, manages a flat “Who’s Peter?” when her younger sister asks about him in a singsongy voice, and steals two chocolate bars from her mother’s secret stash behind a stack of pillowcases in the linen closet.

She doesn’t do daily agendas or five year plans, but one thing she does do is emergency preparedness. This includes: memorizing the contact information for every member of her immediate family in case she loses her phone, carrying two kinds of pepper spray on her at all times, and developing a game plan in case it turns out that her thing for Peter Parker isn’t the kind of thing that she can shut up about until it goes away.

She locks the door of her bedroom behind her and breaks the glass on her contingency plan: a loud 12-song playlist sung entirely by women and titled _‘get your shit together’_ , precisely engineered to cure her of whatever this is in as many forty-one minute loops as it takes. MJ flops facedown onto the bed, hitting play and waiting for Little Mix’s vocals to kick in through her headphones and rescue her.

One song in and she’s feeling less hopeless. Two songs in and the righteous anger is creeping in. Three songs in and she’s ready to punch her feelings in the face.

And then the fourth track kicks in and in the time it takes the first verse to build, Peter texts to ask if she got home safe and MJ lands right back at square one.

She groans and rolls over, glaring up at the ceiling as she rips open the wrapper of the first chocolate bar and angrily breaks off a piece. This is useless. This is useless and now she’s eating her feelings, like some kind of cliche from a movie about a woman that’s been directed by a man.

“I’m too smart to have let this happen,” she says to no one in particular. “How did I let this happen?”

Peter’s not even that cute, she reasons. He's no John Boyega or Dev Patel or Michael B. Jordan. At most, he’s at the higher end of the average white boy attractiveness scale, and even then, she’s seen better. (Okay, so, like, the only face that comes to mind when she tells herself that is Harry Styles, which is embarrassing in and of itself, but it still counts. Peter Parker is definitely not as pretty as Harry Styles.)

And it’s ridiculous, too, that she should be so moved by a single text from him. Checking to make sure your friends make it home alive is the bare minimum. Nobody gets cookies for doing the bare minimum. (Alright, fine, so Peter’s text had been more like a series of texts ending with a picture of Ned asleep on an armchair, captioned, _‘he’d never admit it but I think he missed ur commentary. lasted 20 minutes without it.’_ )

He’s not that reliable, she wants to add, except that he’s fucking _Spider-Man_ and he still makes it to Decathlon practice more often than not, and MJ’s not sure, but she thinks that’s at least partly because she asked him to be there.

She can’t even get as mad as she wants to about the Spider-Man thing. Yes, she’s annoyed that he’s been lying to her for eight months, and yes, he and Ned talk about it so openly that she’d be surprised if the whole school didn’t know, and yes, she wishes he would just trust her enough to tell her.

But the thing about knowing Peter is that it comes with front row seats to all the evidence that Peter is a really, really good guy. Not a nice guy or a sweet guy or whatever other labels guys stick on themselves these days in the hopes of guilting girls into dating them. No, he might mess up a lot of the time, but Peter Parker is a good person right down to his bones, and she might hate it, but she understands that he’s keeping his mouth shut because he genuinely believes it’s better for everyone that way. (Granted, he could be better about actually keeping his mouth shut, but again: he messes up a lot of the time.)

And MJ sighs and puts down the chocolate and hits pause on the playlist, because that’s it, isn’t it? That’s how she let this happen.

Because Peter regularly surprises laughs out of her on days when she’s determined to dislike everything, because he sings ‘The Schuyler Sisters’ from _Hamilton_ with May whenever she listens to it while she cooks, because once she saw him comfort a crying kid in the hallway for a full half hour barely a week after his own uncle died.

Because -- and later she will blame this thought on the chocolate or her lack of sleep or the way the moonlight spills through her window -- Peter is like sunshine: pure light and bright enough on his own that just being around him is enough to warm you to the core.

“Shit,” MJ mumbles, throwing an arm up over her eyes. “Shit.”

* * *

She walks into school the next week with three extra books on hand, determined to have an escape route in case she ends up making things awkward in the way that only she really can. Luckily, she doesn’t wind up needing them. Peter and Ned are either too oblivious to have realized there was anything weird about the way she took off in the middle of movie night or too polite to ask her about it, so she avoids having to explain herself.

When things do go slightly south, it’s her fault. They’re walking to chemistry on Thursday and when Peter brings up Spider-Man, MJ’s subconscious -- which, she is certain, will one day lead her to actually poke a real, live bear -- floats the idea of asking Peter whether he’s seen his alter-ego at the Stark internship lately, and her mouth accepts it without consulting the rest of her brain.

As Peter scrambles to answer, MJ tries to figure out a reasonable explanation for why she might’ve posed that question in the first place, but when she can’t think of one in time, she just keeps talking about how it might be nice to know a superhero, because you could just give them a call and they’d be there whenever you needed them. (If Peter doesn’t know by now that she knows he’s Spider-Man, then he either thinks she is a bizarrely needy person or he’s just too oblivious to catch any of this. She’d never want to cast aspersions on his superhero senses, but MJ sends out a silent plea to the universe for the latter to be true.)

It’s Flash who inadvertently comes to their rescue, trying to throw a subpar insult their way about booty calls or something, and MJ immediately seizes the opportunity to tell him to go fuck himself and take control of the conversation again, throwing out the best excuse she could come up with on the fly. “Personal superhero. Consider it, loser. Then I could be less worried about you getting a concussion immediately before Decathlon finals.”

She doesn’t know if he buys it and she doesn’t stick around to find out, making a beeline for her seat and immediately engaging her lab partner Faiza in conversation about the crutches that she didn’t have with her yesterday. It keeps her brain busy and her eyes off of Peter until Mr. Hudson starts class with a quiz.

* * *

Of course, then she doesn’t need to actively seek out things to keep her distracted, because the school is on fire, which wouldn’t be such a tremendous problem if their teacher hadn’t booked it out of the classroom before he could recall that Faiza was not getting out of this building on her own. Peter is probably busy attempting to track down the source of the fire, which leaves Faiza with exactly one option for help: her.

There’s no pretending that MJ isn’t briefly flooded with panic at the idea of it, but there’s someone counting on her to not mess up, so she pulls herself together and starts making decisions. It’s the second time this week that her propensity for emergency preparedness has come in handy. She tucks the crutches under her arm and maneuvers so that Faiza can rest an arm around her shoulders and they figure out the safest exit route for someone who’s limping. It’s a longer walk, technically, but it also puts a pair of steel doors between them and the fire, so they hobble that way as quickly as they can.

About halfway there, MJ can sense Faiza’s energy starting to flag, and she knows if either one of them gives up now, they’re not beating the smoke to those doors. She thinks of Peter then, of how he can make anybody laugh, of how that light might be more encouraging to her than any pep talk she’s ever heard. MJ is definitely not sunshine, but she’s spent eight months learning from the best, so she’ll give it her best shot.

“You know,” she starts hesitantly, “I don’t think you need the grade boost, but I’m pretty sure that if you want it, you have a guaranteed A on your Chem final this year.”

Faiza lets out a huff that might be a laugh -- or it’s just a wheeze from smoke inhalation and the girl’s about to pass out because MJ can’t find them a way out of the school that she spends every day in. She presses on anyway.

“No, really. Anytime he tries to mark you wrong on something: ‘Hey, Mr. Hudson, remember that time you literally forgot me in a burning building?’”

That one gets a real laugh. “I’m never taking another pop quiz from him again,” Faiza says. “‘Hey, Mr. Hudson, remember how the last surprise we had in this class was a chemical fire?’”

They go on like that, riffing on some admittedly dark possibilities, but it gives them something to think about other than how much further they have to go until suddenly, they don’t have to go any further. She uses the crutches to push the door open and they both step out into the sun, breathing in greedy lungfuls of the clean air. MJ does her best to ignore the way her back and shoulders ache as she helps Faiza off the curb.

Their combined limp-and-stumble technique isn’t the easiest way to travel -- a patch of asphalt that MJ usually crosses in under fifteen seconds feels endless now -- but they make it eventually and sigh a little in relief as the parking lot comes into view. They stagger over to a nearby tree as MJ scans the parking lot and tries to figure out who the closest adult is that she can get help from before she collapses.

There are two people standing a little closer to the school than the rest of the students, and MJ realizes with a swoop in her stomach that it’s Peter and Ned. They’re staring determinedly at the building -- searching, she realizes, for her. (And Faiza, her brain adds. Her and Faiza. Peter and Ned are good people. They’re looking for both of them.)

She hears someone shout something then and it must be about them, because Peter whips around to look their way, and she can see, even from this far away, how the tension seeps out of his shoulders.

Faiza sighs in relief and collapses against the bumper of the nearest car -- a minivan -- and says, “Oh, thank God,” but all MJ can do is watch Peter.

He’s running towards them, the relief plain on his face and honestly, where is the justice in Peter being allowed to look at her like she’s everything when it’s not true? She slumps against the tree and squeezes her eyes shut, trying to slow her breathing so she doesn’t wind up doing something stupid, like cry because Peter Parker demonstrated a modicum of relief over the fact that she wasn’t dead.

When he and Ned finally reach her and Faiza, MJ says as little as possible, not trusting her voice to stay steady. Even after Ned and Faiza walk away, she offers up short, brusque answers, waiting for Peter to follow the other two, but he doesn’t. He just...waits for her. He babbles and he waits and he tries again, offering up the bleachers instead of the parking lot, and MJ is just too tired to pretend she wants to be left alone, so she reaches up and takes his hand instead.

He’s quiet as they find somewhere to sit in the shade, and she doesn’t even realize that she’s still holding his hand until she goes to run a hand through her hair. She lets go then, and he lets her.

She wonders if she should just tell him. About the Spider-Man thing, about the way she admires him but her blood runs cold whenever she watches him risk his life on the news and can’t do anything to help. Or maybe about the other thing, the way that she’d probably aid and abet in a felony if he asked her to, the way that it feels like a victory every time she makes him laugh, the way that she doesn’t know how someone can see so much bad in the world and still be so good.

She opens her mouth to say something -- not that, exactly, but something -- when she’s cut off by Peter saying her name. He’s staring straight ahead and MJ isn't sure what could possibly keep him from looking her in the eye until he says, “I’m Spider-Man.”

It occurs to her that whatever she says next is really, really important, and yet for all of her emergency preparedness, she has no idea what that’s going to be.

She wants to say, ‘I really, really want to be angry at you for not telling me.’

She wants to say, ‘I get why you didn’t.’

She wants to say, ‘If you die on the job I will literally resurrect you just so I can yell at you for leaving me.’

But there’s time for all that later, so for now she just settles on, “I know.”

(And then, like the universe was just warming itself up, Peter makes his second confession to her and this time MJ really is speechless.)

* * *

Afterwards -- after she kisses him and he kisses her and Faiza calls out, “Get it, girl!” and unwittingly causes people in the parking lot who can’t even see them to whoop and cheer, and after he teases her for it and ruins the scowl she’s trying to put back on her face by kissing her nose and making her grin -- afterwards, they stand up to finally make their way to the parking lot and MJ has one last thing to get off her chest.

“Hey, Peter?”

“Yeah?”

“I don’t really like Earl Grey tea that much.”

He literally stops in his tracks, turning to look at her with wide eyes. “Seriously?”

She shrugs. “I mean, I don’t dislike it. I just...kind of prefer other teas more?”

“So- wait…” he says, and there’s the beginnings of a laugh in his eyes. “Did you just keep drinking it because you didn’t want to hurt my feelings?”

MJ sighs. “Yes, okay? Yes. You were trying so hard and I just figured that eventually I’d get you to just switch teas and in the meantime I’d- oh, go away.”

The answering grin on Peter’s face is wide and delighted and just a little bit smug and if MJ didn’t like him so much she’d probably punch him in the arm. She might do it anyway, actually.

“Nah,” he says, starting to walk again and pulling her along by their linked hands. “I’m good right here.”

**Author's Note:**

> I love these nerds to the moon and back and you will pry the classic fanfiction tropes that I applied to them from my cold dead hands.
> 
> Thank you for reading and for all the kind words on _i never planned on no one like you_! Let me know what you thought of this one.


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